Sunday, 16 February 2014

I mentioned to a typical Londoner (youngish, renting a flat with boyf) that I would probably stand at the next local elections.

She asked me what my policies were , to which the simple answer is "High wages and low house prices instead of low wages and high house prices". She liked the sound of that.

I then gave her the two-minute crash course in how this can be achieved and asked her whether she liked the sound of being about £10,000 a year better off. And that's taking the highly pessimistic view that their landlord would "pass on" every single penny of the LVT he has to pay, spreadsheet from para d) here:

Hmm, sounds good, she said, but that means that there will have to be regular revaluations and the LVT might/will keep going up.

Amazing.

I've heard this one many a time from older Homeys, trying to justify them collecting rent and taxes, but not from somebody who's paying the rent and taxes.

She liked the sound of paying less overall in tax/rent/mortgage interest, but would only vote for it if the saving were a fixed and known amount rather than being a moving target, despite the fact that whatever happens in the revaluations, she will always be hugely better off under a 50/50 LVT/flat income tax system than under current rules, and by and large, each future shift of £1 from income tax to LVT will save her around 50p.

That's like somebody accepting a free ticket in a lottery which more or less guarantees them a fixed extra income of £10,000 for life; but turning it down if the more or less guaranteed extra income is an unknown but always large positive figure (which might well be more or less than £10,000).

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comments:

TS, yup. The irony is that those wanting to play the Englishman's Castle lottery are inadvertently voting for higher taxes and a rentier economy. It's like a lottery with a guaranteed negative pay-out.

But this argument also bites its own arse: older people who know house prices occasionally go down are even bigger cheerleaders for HOism that younger people who can be excused for not knowing any better.